Vista - Event ID 1511, 1515 Profile loss to TEMP

We had a strange Vista hiccup this afternoon with one of our clients: She was working in Word, opened a template to begin a project and the system literally hiccuped hiccupped her out.

When she logged back in, her profile was initialized in temporary mode with no messages at all indicating that there was a problem.

She knew there was a problem though because from there on in she was essentially answering all of the same initial questions one would get when logging onto the system for the first time.

Her profile was in C:\Users\Temp.

We tried to recover the profile by checking the settings in the registry, but they were correct.

We tried to rename her original local profile folder, but when she logged in she still received the TEMP folder as her profile location.

The errors associated:

Log Name: Application
Source: User Profile Service
Date: 9/9/2008 2:45:06 PM
Event ID: 1511
Task Category: None
Level: Warning
Keywords: Classic
User: domain\UserName
Computer: MyComputer
Description: Windows cannot find the local profile and is logging you on with a temporary profile. Changes you make to this profile will be lost when you log off.

and

Log Name: Application
Source: Microsoft-Windows-User Profiles Service
Date: 9/9/2008 2:45:06 PM
Event ID: 1515
Task Category: None
Level: Warning
Keywords: Classic
User: domain\UserName
Computer: MyComputer
Description: Windows has backed up this user profile. Windows will automatically try to use the backup profile the next time this user logs on.

It was a bit of a strange puzzle, but a bit of searching turned up the cure:

1. Reboot
2. Log on as a local admin other than the user with the profile problem.
3. Copy the old C:\Users\%UserName% contents to a network location.
4. Delete the C:\Users\%UserName% directory
5. Delete Delte the C:\Users\TEMP directory
6. Regedit
7. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
8. Find the SID for the user with the corrupted profile and delete it (profile directory will be C:\Users\%UserName%.
9. Reboot.
10. Logon with the affected user's account.

The profile will recreate itself and work just as it should. Copy the contents of the original profile back into their respective places.

For Exchange integrated and My Documents redirected sites the contents will essentially be the user's Desktop and Favorites folders. Keep in mind that the Offline Files feature may take time to synchronize for large profiles and Outlook may take some time to build up the OST file.

Links:

• Fix tip: Vistax64.com Forums: Vista - User Profile was not loaded correctly (Samir ~2/3 way down).
• Microsoft KB947215: Error message when you log on to a Windows Vista-based computer by using a temporary profile: "The User Profile Service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded".

Note that no message was displayed to the user.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

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